Blast from the past

September 14, 2005

Week of Sept. 11, 1955

Despite the fact several weeks have elapsed since the heavy rains, the county roads department is still hard at work repairing the washouts and other damage the downpours caused to the more than 250 miles of dirt roads in the county.

Superintendent E. Eugene Geary said yesterday that about 85 percent of his working force has been busy on the repair work and much work remains to be done.

Of interest to Hagerstown residents who obtain drinking water from the Potomac River, is word from Cumberland that a $2,000,000 sewage treatment plant there is over 20 percent completed. Raw sewage will no longer be dumped into the Potomac at Cumberland where it flows down the valley to become the drinking water - after treatment - of Hagerstown, Washington, D.C., and other communities.

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The Clerk of Court's office this week was forced to turn away a white man who applied for a license to wed a Negress. Clerk G. Merlin Snyder says it is the first time in his long service in the office that two of different color applied for a license.

The clerk explained that the Supreme Court decision ending segregation had no bearing on Maryland law against miscegenation and that they would have to go to another state where there is no such law.

Week of Sept. 11, 1980

It's not every day that the President of the United States drops in on your farm, but Friday was THE DAY for Jack and Ginny Slick.

At about 3:30 p.m. yesterday afternoon, two handsome Marine helicopters landed on a recently cut hay field on the couple's Rising Hill Farm on Dam No. 5 Road. Out stepped President Jimmy Carter, his wife and their party, all in sports clothes. After brief greetings and picture taking with the Slicks, the visitors were whisked off to the Potomac for an afternoon of fishing.

Antietam National Battlefield Park has opened a new 134-seat auditorium at the battlefield visitors' center north of Sharpsburg. The auditorium was paid for with federal funds.

Founded in 1875 by Mathias Peter Moller, a Denmark native who immigrated to this country, M.P. Moller Pipe Organs was, and is, a family concern, run by his descendants.

One of those descendants, Peter Daniels, says the average organ takes just over a year to build. Moller's 220 employees can turn out 110 to 120 organs a year, depending on the size of the instruments. Daniels added that a normal organ for the average church would run in the neighborhood of $40,000 to $60,000.